You (and others in this thread) are way, way underestimating the cost of configuration options in software used by lots of people. There's the cost of having to support that huge fractal in the code. And there's the cost of things being broken for users who don't understand the options and broke things for themselves. Configuration options are bad news for software not intended exclusively for technical users.

Alienating some of your most loyal users whom have spent decades advocating for Firefox has its costs too, and there are always ways to safeguard or hide configuration options, such as about:config.

Personally I wouldn't mind a slight expansion to highlight the search bar, but the current design is crude and over the top, and it has led to usability issues.

For some balance:

As someone who is one of those most loyal users and has been using Mozilla since they were releasing milestones of the app suite after the 1998 open-sourcing, then moving on to Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox... I can say I just don't care about this change. I run beta channel, and it was a weird jarring surprise when I first saw it a month or so ago, but within a few hours I just stopped noticing it, and stopped caring.

I just don't get why people end up in arms about such trivial changes to software. Admittedly I used to be like that, to some extent, but at some point I realized this sort of thing doesn't actually affect my life in any meaningful way and so there's no point worrying about it.

Change your mindset. This sort of thing is not worth even the tiniest raise in blood pressure. It's a waste of time and energy to even give it a second thought. Doing so provides no value to anyone, especially yourself.

If nobody cared about the quality of software we'd still be using internet explorer.

Nothing about this change applies a change in quality. It's the opinion of a few vocal people that this is bad, nothing more.

I don't like this change but haven't publicly remarked about it until now. What about the vast majority of people who don't browse hn or haven't been provoked into making their opinions heard? Dismissing opinions you don't agree with as vocal minority won't help you and certainly won't help Mozilla.

Mozilla like other companies providing user-centric products must conduct focus groups to see what works and what doesn't. Relying on designers' ideas without proper validation is a recipe for disaster.

> but within a few hours I just stopped noticing it, and stopped caring

> there's no point worrying about it

So continuing that logic, people should not care about, or notice about something mozilla spent time and resources on, and made a risk on. Bad project management IMO then.

> Change your mindset

why? if it's not worth the frustration, why is it worth the change?

I'll admit, I didn't directly notice it immediately, but it felt off. What annoyed me was reading the reasoning - "Focused, clean search experience that's optimized for smaller laptop screens", yeah, I don't want that optimization. This "help you focus" crap (in general, for years) is ridiculous. I like density, but not stupid density. I didn't pay for screen real estate to get "beautiful" whitespace.

True but look at about:config.. there are a lot of options already! It's one reason people use Firefox

about:config is not for typical users.

This discussion is about a preference which would be (and is/was) in about:config

It would be nice if Firefox stayed friendly to technical users then. They have a large market factor that Chrome does not have in that it's favorable to us techies; we then contribute to Firefox in return. Shooting tinkerers in the foot loses the value we provide.

Indeed, Chrome removing the option to use backspace to go back is why I dropped it years ago.

Tell that to people who A/B test…

and companies copying features no user asked for from the top competition is even more expensive and dumb.

it's like gnome giving up all its good differentiating features during the great rewrite just to mimic osx, no matter they were in a cargo cult mindset copying even the flaws, shortcomings and bugs.

here Mozilla is copying Chrome's abusive forceful use of google's services from the UI, no matter if the user wants or not

I loved firefox actually for the ability to style the UI using user styles. IMHO they need to bring back the old way of customizing. In constrast to Thunderbird (which allows it but has even less of a community) allowing webextension experiments and unsigned addons in any version might bring back freedom even in the times of webextensions. I really hate how they started patronizing their loyal users with all its colateral damage. It has become easier to customize chrome than firefox, strange times...